Thursday, September 17, 2020

Another Update, 09/17

 SO, now that we're sharing our smoke with the rest of the country...

...here's what it looks like in front of Schloss Drang right now:

©2020, D.W.Drang & The Cluemeter
So we thought it was going to clear by today. Turns out that what rain we got is not at high enough altitudes to do the trick, and more importantly, was not accompanied by winds strong enough to do it.

Despite that nearly "zero-zero" visibility at surface level, air quality as reported by WA Air Quality Monitoring and the Washington Smoke Blog has improved from "Hazardous" to "merely" "Unhealthy" or even "Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups" throughout much of the state. 

Huzzah, and all that.

The WA Smoke Blog has several blogposts over the past few days that review the data, and also reports that Seattle has had some of the worst air quality in the world the last week or so.

I believe that we need to emphasize that, yes, this is the worst air quality on record, but the record goes back a whopping 20 years, so several grains of salt may be in order.

Cliff Mass is a meteorologist, and professor of meteorology at the University of Washington*. He has a blog: Cliff Mass Weather Blog. The topic of his post for the day is The Extraordinary Longevity of Wildfire Smoke. Good one, accompanied by easy to understand maps.

Yesterday he had The End is in Sight which included charts and graphs that might be a little, um, esoteric. (And a satellite photo which predicted the least coast being smoky.)

By the way, in case the whole COVID issue hasn't convinced anyone that "the models" are problematic, several of Professor Mass' blog posts this week have discussed why "the models" have failed to predict exactly what the hell is going on with this wildfire smoke with anything that comes close to accuracy, so maybe it's time we all realized that "the models" require a large enough dose of salt to be hazardous to our blood pressure...

...Among other things, many or most weather forecasting models fail to take the fact that wildfire smoke will reflect solar radiation, resulting in temperatures that are 20-30 degrees cooler than the forecasts produce.




*You may have heard of Professor Mass because he posted a blog post about the antifa domestic terrorist's rampage in Seattle, comparing one particular night's activities to Kristallnacht. This got him "cancelled". Otherwise respectable local journalists have declared that one should "never use a Nazi comparison". No matter how apt. And, presumably, especially if the subject is activity approved by the left.
The cancellation was literal, BTW, as he had a show on the local NPR station talking about the science of weather. "Had" being the operative word. He was already on thin ice due to a tendency to explain how and why the topic of conversation is not, in fact, caused by anthropogenic climate change.



1 comment:

Old NFO said...

Honesty doesn't pay in the media world...